The policies might've helped by now, but then Covid. And Covid intersected with the legacy of successive governments who were really into neoliberalism from the mid 80s until the early 2000s, which, for the purposes of building houses, manifested as the fact that we had sold nearly all of our manufacturing capacity, and either the land that produced the raw materials, or the rights to harvest those forests, to overseas companies, in the name of a belief in the Invisible Hand.
The end result is that New Zealand's forest products are largely owned and harvested by foreign companies[0] who ship the logs overseas for value-added processing in their own mills (China imports 54% of the logs we export), and then we import our building products, because we no longer have the ability (or desire, I guess) to process them domestically.
So when Covid disrupted global supply chains, any potential significant increase in construction due to regulation changes was immediately inhibited by building supply shortages and massive price spikes. And given how very far away from everyone New Zealand is, we were rather low on the priority list for resumption of supply.
I'm very much in favour of the regulatory changes, but very sad to say that Auckland hasn't fixed anything yet.
Oh, and friends don't let friends do neoliberalism, and Substack writers writing about the NZ market, should perhaps run it past an NZer first.
[0]: https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/farming/agribusiness/116369...